CARIBBEAN ROUND-UP
Jewellery store heist in Trinidad
PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad — The police in Trinidad and Tobago were yesterday intensifying the hunt for three bandits who were involved in a heist at a jewellery store they robbed of some TT$1.4 million (TT$6=US$1).
The robbery took place on Saturday afternoon at Rajiv Jewellers in the Valpark Shopping Plaza in Valsayn.
While a woman, believed to have been a “lookout” for the criminals stood just outside the door to the store with a child. One of the three men bought a pair of silver earrings as the trio of robbers pretended to also have an interest in the jewellery on display.
After completing the purchase for the earrings the three men virtually simultaneously pulled out their revolvers and shouted to the owner: “This is a hold-up”, as they immediately started to snatch up as much jewellery as possible, with a concentration on the heavier gold items.
They then sauntered out of the store, leaving the shocked owner to witness them being joined by the woman accomplice with the child at the door of his store.
Caricom’s rice challenge
GEORGETOWN, Guyana — Heads of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) have a responsibility to find “a practical resolution” at their summit next month in Jamaica to the outstanding problem of Caribbean rice producers being adversely affected by cheap, subsidised imports of the commodity.
After failure to deal with the problem for over two years, the Caricom government leaders should no longer “pass the buck” to either a technical committee or their Trade Ministers, according to an editorial in yesterday’s Sunday Chronicle.
The public sector-owned newspaper said that following the failure of the recently concluded meeting of the ministerial Council for Trade and Economic Development (COTED) in Georgetown, it was now very much up to the Community heads of government to end the negative consequences for the economies of rice-producing countries like Guyana, Suriname and Belize as a direct result of the dumping in the region of subsidised rice.
The affected Caricom rice producers, with Guyana being the largest in the region, are united in their quest for an estimated 15 per cent hike in the Common External Tariff (CET) against third country imports of rice, with the USA being the single biggest exporter to the region.
But consumer countries like Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and St Lucia are concerned that a hike from the current 25 per cent on the CET to 40 percent could have the effect of price increases for rice on their respective local markets.
The Chronicle, however, said that it cannot be beyond the capacity of the Caricom leaders to come forward with a mutually satisfactory resolution to a problem that needs to be addressed urgently.
Illegal guns from Suriname in Guyana
GEORGETOWN, Guyana — Sophisticated illegal weapons, including AK-47s and M-70 assault rifles are being smuggled into Guyana from neighbouring Suriname on its eastern border.
That is the claim of President Bharrat Jagdeo who said that some of the illegal weapons have been coming across the border in containers originating from the United States of America.
He was at the time speaking to the local media at the weekend, on last week’s offensive against armed criminals by the security forces with 11 of them killed within two days in joint police/army operations in the Buxton/Friendship area on the East Coast and also in Georgetown.
Jagdeo said that while the criminals evidently had various sources of supply of the heavy weapons with which they were being found, among them AK-47s and M70 assualt rifles, Suriname has been identified by security intelligence as “a main source”.
Just last week another Caribbean Community head of government, the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Patrick Manning, spoke of his government’s worrying concern over the flow of illegal guns into the country from neighbouring Venezuela, particularly following attempts to depose the government of President Hugo Chavez with a lot of illegal weapons on the streets.